Wednesday, June 17, 2015

SH129 - skywide, armspread













video: The Wind Rises
music: Manowar - Mountains (edit)
link: zippyshare [84.9 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: June 2015

A decent video that mostly stays within the lines, this one has a nice positive message, and would not be, really, the worst epitaph in the whole world should I get killed doing something stupid in Shiretoko.  If you're mad that I cut the song, I'm sorry; it must be awful having to be the kind of person who cares about Manowar that much.  For comparison, I didn't cut SH013 soon enough, and look how that turned out.

Monday, June 8, 2015

INSO19 - CHOPWORK 1 1/2 cups dashi













video: Koufuku Graffiti
music: Defiled - Eciov Errazib
link: zippyshare [5.7 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: May 2015

I was listening to Defiled's Divination record while cutting SH128 and there was a decent amount of "Kirin loses her shit" in the source pool that I couldn't/wasn't going to use for the main video, so this happened.  The "1 1/2" refers to the initial idea that there was going to be a part II to this CHOPWORK thing, which would have come after this one; the "dashi" bit is left over from the very loose idea to use bits of old dudes shaving bonito from Sushi and Beyond in between the freakouts, which did not end up being necessary.

It should also be mentioned here that the CHOPWORK thing is also a reference; fortunately, Soul Remnants decided they were done with the name before I went ahead and stole it.

SH128 - CHOPWORK - A Feast of Death For The Prettiest Princess



















video: Koufuku Graffiti
music: Beheaded Zombie - Life Line (cut)
link: zippyshare [21.7 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: May 2015

There was going to be more to this, but I couldn't make the Soreption half to the project work the way I wanted it to.  This is still pretty good, though.

The Haemorrhage graphic overlay is not actually in the video, but any death metal fan looks at Ryo doing her surgeon pose there and that's what comes to mind.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

SH127 - into the arms of night













video:  Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai
music: Black Harvest - Behind Every Tree And Stone
link: zippyshare [76.8 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: May 2015

I ended up spending nearly 16 hours in the editor on this one.  Some of that was added work doing check builds so that I could actually see the video working (or not) live, because my editing station is pushing six years old and is not really capable of playing HD video back in-editor, but a lot of it was the part where this is five and a half minutes and includes three wall hits.  This was an incredible pain to do the work on to bring it to completion, so it's a good thing that the video turned out this good.

cutting mix, in case anyone is interested, because the dedicated post from SH126 actually got some traffic:

Black Harvest - Ingrate
- repeated between each of -
Insomnium - One For Sorrow
Daylight Dies - Dismantling Devotion
Carcass - Swansong (shut up, this was a melodic doom-death video I was working on, horses for courses)
Fallujah - The Flesh Prevails
In Flames - Whoracle
Dark Tranquillity - Construct

Sunday, April 26, 2015

INSO18 - The End of Fun and Games
















video: leftovers of SH126
music: The Mountain Goats - Foreign Object
link: zippyshare [4.7 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: April 2015

Beat the Champ came out while I was cutting for SH126.  The source pool had a lot of dudes getting harmed in the eyeball.  So this kind of suggested itself, and fortunately, I had pretty much exactly enough cuts to cover the second, funnier, chorus from this song.  This is a lot more "curated" than "edited" -- the cuts are pretty much damn near in alphabetical order by title and by how they were named, so it is an INSO thing rather than a SH AMV.  There's potential, in the wide world of "stuff I did not cut up for this video" for someone else to find another two or three minutes of dudes getting poked in the eye and make a full vid out of this, but it's not something I'd ever do; if I'm going to do an actual video off this record, it will be with "The Legend of Chavo Guerrero" and a whole lot of work to splice, like, Tiger Mask and some family-drama thing together.  (This is probably not a video that is ever going to happen.)

The Sights of Horror, A Taste of Blood, The Howls of the Damned: Inhaling the Stench of Revulsion


Normally, when I'm working on a video, I listen to the record that I'm pulling the song from while I'm doing the cut, maybe in with a couple others if it's a long cut.  For SH126, that wasn't going to fly; this was a 60-plus-block cut, each of those blocks taking at least one play of ...Seventh Day..., and if you need a way to go spare in a hurry, listening to the same record 60 times in a row is a great way to do it.  That the video is the way it is is due mostly to the idea and the application in the edit phase, but it's also due to the stack of records I had up while doing the cut that produced the source pool.  This is what I was on while working on this one.

Suffocation - Effigy of the Forgotten
While more brutal and slammier than Master, Suffocation's big-team debut is still from the same general era, and is a nice tight package of devastation that keeps the blasts pumping without interruption.  This is mainly why this one is in the stack rather than Breeding...; the covers of both are still essential to the period aesthetic.

Broken Hope - Swamped In Gore
Broken Hope - In The Bowels of Repugnance
I have the Metal Blade anniversary reissue of these two records, both of which should be considered essential.  Swamped... is a little tighter, with fewer acoustic-guitar interludes, but ...Bowels... hits harder when it's not being period-arty.  I don't have any of Blood's takes on contemporary grindcore to work with, but it's always something that comes to mind from Broken Hope in this era; same general feel, same zeitgeist.  THE! HEAD! OF! A! DEAD! CAT!

Bolt Thrower - War Master
Speaking of grind, this is almost definitely going to be my go-to grind-death record in the future.  I really ought to have more Bolt Thrower (see Morbid Angel for similar regrets); this probably matches in better than any other band with the actual video-source track.

Master - On the Seventh Day God Created...
A record I fell in love with in college and still go back to; for the video I was limiting myself to just the original disc, but I currently own the reissue with two live sets on the bonus disc, and if there's anything better than classic Master, it's live classic Master, provided you can't get live Master at close range, as I've been privileged enough to on a couple occasions.

Morbid Angel - Altars of Madness
I called out the similarities between Dan Seagrave's essential cover to this one and some Kujaku-oh direction while working on the video; more important is the large number of killer tracks on this.  I'm not likely to do another Morbid Angel video after SH102, but someone who has not done their Morbid Angel video might have better luck than me with "Maze of Torment" and something (or several somethings) from this era of anime.

Death - Spiritual Healing
Heavier than the first two albums and not as progressive as the brown period stuff that comes after it, this is the sweet spot of Death for a video like this, and it gets me to actually listen to this record more...because I prefer the thrashy lunacy of the early stuff and the locked-in technicality of late Death to it.  Go fig.  Still classic.

Devastation - Idolatry
A practically forgotten late brutal thrash metal record, this is another one special-ordered on good memories from the college radio station.  If you listen to a lot of Dark Angel, Kreator, early Death, and classic Pestilence, you will probably dig it as well.

Bolt Thrower - Mercenary
In the middle of the cut I had a Saturday spare and found this one again at Armageddon Shop Boston.  It's just as masterful as back when I didn't steal it from the radio station in college fifteen years ago.  Completely essential, no question.

Gorgoroth - Pentagram
Other black metal records flitted in and out of the lineup (shouts to Mayhem and Inquisition), but this one, a tight and primitive 30 minutes, stayed in due to retaining enough dirt to connect it back to the Master feel and getting over quickly enough to avoid getting up its own ass.

Hail of Bullets - On Divine Winds
A semi-concession to modernity, but with a committedly old-school sound to hook back in to the purpose of guiding the cut.  Also, this is fucking Martin van Drunen, and my Pestilence discs are not mastered in a way to match in with the feel that I was going for.  If I had bothered to buy the first God Among Insects record back when that was current, it would probably be in this stack as well.

Morbid Angel - Covenant
If I owned Blessed..., it would be in here too, but I'm a fucking false and don't.  Something to fix; in the meantime, this is "Blood on my Hands" and "God of Emptiness", the latter of which was a serious backup candidate for this video all the way through.  Think SH126 fails it?  Grab this one and show me what you can do with late-Shouwa/early-Heisei.

Paganizer - Basic Instructions For Dying
Raw Swedish thrash-death in the vein of Dismember, but without the "holy shit fuckin Dismember" dimension to make me jump up and put body parts through the walls.  I had the privilege of seeing these dudes at Party.San some years back, and try to keep that spirit of stripped-down aggro alive when I'm cutting to their tracks.

Sodom - Agent Orange
Of course, if we're talking brutal thrash, there's a Sodom representative.  I'm solidly on Team Kreator still, but listening to Kreator for me demands full attention; Sodom lets me concentrate on the video while delivering more grimy brutality, which was what was needed for this cut.

SH126 - The Stench of Revulsion
















video: a bunch of brutal late-Shouwa/early-Heisei hand-painted stuff
music: Master - What Kind of God
link: zippyshare [41.1 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: April 2015

An idea that kind of spontaneously selfsuggested itself in like 2013, this one survived a move and several intercontinental expeditions to the point where I finally had the training reacquired and the six weeks to put into working on it in early '15.  Because this took a long friggin time in planning, cutting, and execution, I had the time to do some serious overthinking, as below:

--

So you thought that just because the current video is a pile of gore and relentless trigger-abusing blastbeats, you'd get away without a manifesto?  Not a chance -- I overthink everything, and death metal is no exception.

In the process for this video, I watched basically everything in my collection that fit the profile -- brutal hand-drawn late-Shouwa/early-Heisei OVAs and movies -- and in addition to the ones that made it into the video, I ran across a couple others that did not get up to sufficient brutality levels, but had significant overlap with the ones that did.  The real trigger was Utsu no Miko; the blend of exoteric Buddhist elements strongly recalls (and in a couple places repeats) Karura Mau, Judge, and Kujaku-oh, which did get into the source pool; this couldn't be simple coincidence.

Basically, what people of my generation and inclinations tend to think of as "real" anime is a historical accident, created by a confluence of forces on both sides of the Pacific, that is properly considered a weird evolutionary dead end of the late '80s and early '90s, the same period that Morbid Angel got signed to Giant.  First, in Japan, there was for whatever reason in the late '80s and into the '90s, a significant revival of interest in exoteric Buddhist and Hindu practices, and in Chinese astrology.  You can see traces of this in Fushigi Yuugi, at its most visible; it gets dropped in passing in Sword For Truth (in the source pool) and forms the plot backbone of Maryuu Senki (not in the source pool because SH073).  The blooming home video market and the existing tentacle-porn tropes in Japan grew this into ero-grotesque; most of this stuff is at least tentatively ero-guro, which is why it's not around any more.

I'm talking, of course, about the Miyazaki case.  Japan ran headfirst into a moral panic about this stuff in 1996, and while the major emphasis has been taught as revealing the existence of doujinshi to society, there wasn't any real censoring effect there.  You can't, by nature, censor doujins, because they're self published, but what you can do is close down ero-guro video production.  This is a continuing reminder that anime is not actually DIY -- this shit costs a LOT of money to put together, and that cost has to be 1) fronted and 2) recouped.  If it's hard to do the first because your investors don't want to deal with the media hyperventilating and hard to do the second because your potential customers can't pick it up without getting reported to the police as a potential sex criminal, that product doesn't get made.  The climate for ero-guro got a lot more constrained in the mid-90s, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult also took a lot of the shine off the whole "secretive Buddhist sect" idea.

Tangent: watching through what turned out to be a very large bunch of porn for additional titles further keyed this in.  If you're not actually into watching girls get raped by tentacles and don't have to do it for source collection reasons, you can cut to the chase by watching Lesson of Darkness, maybe Twin Dolls (which is borderline-empowering for a tentacle rape hentai and thus probably the least bad of the bunch), and the criminally overlooked Call Me Tonight, which is not porn but underlines the tropes involved.  From traditional religion you get the idea of the injuu, the sex beast, which in Lesson of Darkness as in folklore is capable of preying on humans without killing them.  Why did this evolve?  Pretty obviously, to elide rape victims naming names and stirring up village power structures, and also to give cover to infidelity/unchastity when both partners aren't caught simultaneously ("I was attacked by an injuu, but it took the form of X, so I let my guard down").  The problem with this, though, is not only that it gives the powerful free reign to rape the powerless (which would happen anyway, especially in a society where nobles were given dispensation to kill peasants to do quality control on swords), but that it makes rape a crime that is never committed by human beings, always by monsters.

So you've got this current idea of the sex monster, and you also have a sex-segregated society, one under severe repression to the point that (viz Call Me Tonight) sexual urges are seen as turning men, especially men, into animals and/or grotesque monsters.  And you're selling videos pushing these ideas to a population of poorly-socialized young men, many of whom have problems expressing themselves and little experience of interacting with women of any age socially -- you can see why there would be a concern about a certain small number of them regularly getting caught up into "ore wa ningen de wa nai -- ore wa injuu da!", on the thesis that they were already monsters, and should follow their sex-monster nature and actually start raping, because there wasn't anything they could do about it, and it would happen anyway.  If you think this is unrealistic, you don't know enough people with severe self-esteem problems, desperate to latch onto any power fantasy that can make them feel like they're in control.

And thus the injuu, as a plot element, passed into history.  Weirdly, this has resulted in more rape, and more ickily realistic rape, in modern hentai, but it's more clear that the rapists are human beings with bad motives.  It's also worth noting that as you get into the late '90s, you get the first flowering of expansive eroge on CD, where there was room to do a relatively deep story in a relatively DIY fashion: stuff like Tokimeki Memorial and Kanon, where you could be an eyeless milquetoast and still bang the crap out of everything that smiled vertically, provided you were willing to invest 60 hours of gameplay and spade the hell out of the b-tree of the storyline choices.  This is not only cheaper, but less socially dangerous (even the ones where the protagonist is a teacher introducing middle schoolers to BDSM, somehow) and a hell of a lot easier for the shut-in audience to identify with.

The other set of factors was in the United States.  The copy of Hanappe Bazooka that's in the pool is from commercial VHS, and it really shows what ADV was able to buy back when Hanappe Bazooka was something they'd consider releasing commercially.  The trailers at the start cover Luna Varga -- a mostly-forgettable four-episode D&D crank-turner with a really weird hook -- and a bunch of other Go Nagai stuff: Kekko Kamen (not in the pool, because it is too garbage even for this video) and Shuten Doji, which did get in.  So why is ADV buying mostly Go Nagai stuff back when they went by A. D. Vision?  Mostly, because it was cheap: with short series, you can cut down the up-front cost of the license, and if you can get it onto one or two volumes, you can avoid getting stuck with the overage of print runs as people stop collecting somewhere between volumes 1 and 10.  The ero-guro stuff was pretty much tailor-made for this market: short runs because these were limited OVAs to start with, and relatively cheap because they weren't that popular.

So what we got presented to us in the US as anime in the mid-1990s was heavily distorted by countervailing historical forces in the marketplace: we caught a very large fraction of an all-time high-water mark in brutality thanks to broke stateside distros and an inflection point in Japanese standards.  Historically, most anime does not look like it has a place in this video: a quick look at ARR's inventory should be enough to demonstrate that.  Thinking of high-prod-values, hand-drawn brutality as 'anime' doesn't really hold water historically -- and really, a lot of the nostalgia people have for this period is because so much of the anime that belongs to it is fucking garbage.

Seriously.  Hanappe Bazooka must be the single worst and most pointless piece of vomit ever animated.  Sword For Truth is straight-up terrible.  Crimson Wolf is dumb even for a Maceck show.  Shuten Doji in any other context would get called out as bad and unfinished.  M.D. Geist is a nonsensical Mad Max ripoff saved only by a lunatic commitment to gore that has dudes excavating rifle ports in their human shields with bayonets.  This is a source pool that has the unfocused Judge and an out-of-focus, deep-gen copy of Karura Mau as its actual good titles, and if I were to throw stuff I've used already in, it would not improve: Maryuu Senki is not notably better than Kujaku-oh, and Ninja Scroll is a series of video-game boss battles.  What we want is for the mature storytelling of Otomo and Anno to make use of this sort of blood and nightmare.  We want a landscape of moving Suffocation covers, and we don't get it, because the money to produce it isn't there, this shit being deeply unpopular.

What we can do is limited, but of immediate use: we can stop faffing around waiting for anime to go back to a way it never was, and we can conserve as best we can what remains of that golden age: when machine grotesque moved, even just for a little bit, and got published further because the demand for it was small.  The blood will not flow again, but with the bones we can build a shrine.